Getting better all the time

I will have to admit. It is harder to write when you feel well. this is a good thing.

Sometimes I find the most useful measure of increasing wellness to be the repitition of a task I have done seasonally. In specific, today I am thinking of riding my bike to work. I ride my bike to work when the weather is fair. I also live in Boston which means that I do not ride my bike to work for substantial portions of the year. I began riding again this week, after a layoff since November.

I was reminded this week that ast year, as recently as november, my bikes to work were a chore. I recall that my body would complain day after day as I rode through the fatique of illness. That pressing heavy, ever present lasssitude that settled into my bones in 1998, and has not left since. I recall sitting in the seat, and being careful to shift to preserve what was left of my tattered nerves.

I recalled, this week, by comparison, how I used to concentrate to hold my mind still. I needed to be vigilant to suppress the racing, spiralling thoughts, in attempts to maintian a safe eye on traffic. It was like living ina fog. Things would suddenly and violently come into view, and then dissapear again into the murk. It was frightening, and abrupt, and things had only a short life span before they faded and died. My focus, my attention span, was at best a few seconds.

Today, for instance, when I rode in, I was able to compare the experiences of just a few months ago. I felt that way so often, that I could recall exactly the experience, and because the two rides were seperated by so many months, I was able to truly appreciate the improvement. My legs were fine. I had the energy to keep pushing, and when I got to work, I felt...fine. [author's note: it is very difficult to explain normalcy. For this reason I think most doctors make the mistake of assuming that a mentally ill person is really fine, and wants to achieve a state of super health where they feel no pain and are high and know no darkeness or something. I stand by what I said when I was sick: you know. You know health, and you know normal. Your body can tell the differences. Still words are crude to describe the expereince]. My head was so clear. There was just a pristine silence in it. Things came, and went, and the chatter was gone, the goldfish in a bowl sense of existence was gone, and in its place a long, tranquil horizon.

And those observations hold across other activities in my life. The tired is gone. The focus is broader and longer. The emotions are stable. The darkness is gone. This is not to say my likfe is constant bliss, but it is normal disspointment, normal inability to concentrate, its normal.

Not forgotten

I have not forgotten this blog. Its just that I am in the midst of a major paradigm shift, that is to everyone but me, expremely underwhelming. I never suspected that recovery would teach me so much about my illness. At least I thought I had little left to learn. But the more I look at the unwinding of the sickness, the more the emphasis shifts from a genetic timebomb which exploded beneath me, to an image of extreme stresses pressing my body/mind to its predetermined genetic breaking point.

The key was not realizing how long it could take to recover. One would think that 5 years of coddling the body would produce health, especially if it were only the presence of stressors that made the body ill. One would be wrong. That is my conclusion.

As you may or may not know, or care, I continue to sack the internet and popular media, as well as journals and medical books that I can understand for expereinces that are similar to mine. Well, I am beggining, strangely now, to find more tales that are similar, though not the same, and they are instructive.

I found the tale of a woman who had been ill like I had. She had also gotten ill as I had, through years of physical and nutritional punishment on her body. She decribes long days of work, fuled by low fat vegetarian cuisine. As she ate less meat, she grew more suscpetible to indigestion in the meats she did eat. soon gone were fish, eggs, and then milk. She drank fruit juices, and ate brown rice. Soon she was not able to digest fat well. But she persevered. In the end her system wekaened, and she broke. Her problems were similar to mine, severe lassitude, dizzyness, extraperceptions, headaches, paranoia, dark depression. The interesting thing I learned was this...she went to a chinese herbalist, and then later reintroduced appropriate nutrrition into her body, and it STILL TOOK 20 YEARS TO REGAIN HER HEALTH. Its a version of the same thing I did to myself, and a version of the same approach I took to healing. I was always wary to attribute all the problems to the abuse I visited on my body in 4 years of college water polo, 7.5 hours 3 days a week, 6 hours the other 4, and a vegetarian diet, that turned to a vegan diet, that turned to a low/no fat vegan diet, add a dash of starvation, and a bit of psychological stress and toxic water supply, because I reversed that course and fed my body ample amounts,good quiality fats, healing broths, fermented foods, raw fruits and vegetables, and supplements like only my loyal readers care to know...and it STILL TOOK 6 years to turn it around. Ok, its not 180 degrees yet, and the clock is still ticking, but the point is that I now view what is left to heal as the ravages of a constant state of stressor abuse.

I drew interesting comparisons and lessons from men in POW camps in WWII. Not to compare whatever horrors those men endured, but at an abstract level the stimuli ar ethe same- malnutrition, starvation, and grueling labor. I read their cases. many of them did not recover their health for decades, if ever.

Well, that what I am thinking of right now. I am not addressing hypoglycemia except as it is a symptom. I am healing my hypothalmus, I guess, the master endocrine gland, and healing a damaged digestive tract and all that entails.

The health is good these days. Hardly notice a thing. Lets say 5 days of good health a week, and 2 we muscle through. How is that?